In fact, as became apparent a few moments later, they hadn't recognized it. Yanakov was changing course, turning away from the threat he'd just detected, and launching his LACs. With only Republican levels of capability allowed to his reconnaissance drones, his LACs were his best long-range sensor platforms, despite their far lower acceleration rates, and he was sending them out to check out the suspect contacts. At the same time, as a precaution, he was deploying the bulk of his Katanas between his battle squadrons and Hasselberg. His battlecruisers were redeploying, as well, shifting to cover the threat axis with their anti-missile defenses.
It was clear Yanakov didn't intend to allow himself to be drawn into automatically assuming he was seeing what his tactical sections thought they were seeing. At the same time, he'd equally clearly decided he had to honor the threat and shift his formation to meet it.
Which was exactly what Hasselberg had wanted him to do.
The next thirty minutes passed slowly as Honor and Jaruwalski watched the shifting patterns in the plot. Yanakov's turn away from Hasselberg had the effect of closing the range to Morser even more rapidly, but at such ranges "rapid" was a purely relative term.
Hasselberg was playing the game well, Honor decided. Once he'd given Yanakov a sniff of his position and drawn an obvious response, he cycled down the power of his decoys' signatures. It looked exactly as if he wasn't positive he'd been detected and he was reducing acceleration to cut back the strength of his impeller signatures and make his stealth systems more effective. The maneuver both lent verisimilitude to his deception and made it even harder to penetrate by requiring the reconnaissance LACs to close to much shorter range for positive identification.
Honor pursed her lips thoughtfully as the range from Morser's squadrons to Yanakov's dropped steadily. Yanakov was already in MDM range, and in another few minutes his LACs were going to get close enough to see through Hasselberg's masquerade. So if she were Morser, she'd be firing just about-
"Vizeadmiral Morser's opened fire, Your Grace," Jaruwalski said, and Honor nodded.
"So I see," she said mildly, folded her hands behind her once again, and walked calmly back to her command chair.
Judah was going to be... irritated with himself, she thought with a mental grin. He'd obviously taken Hasselberg's bait, after all. He might not have allowed himself to go charging after it, but Hasselberg and his skillfully deployed drones had riveted Yanakov's attention on the smaller of the Andermani task groups. His tac crews hadn't been paying as much attention to other possible axes of threat, and when Morser launched, Yanakov's screen-and Katanas-were badly out of position, with very poor shots at the incoming tide of missiles. Moreover, Morser had stacked her pods deeply. Her sixteen superdreadnoughts had deployed almost six hundred pods; now they launched a total of 4,608 attack and EW missiles... and five hundred and seventy-six Apollo control missiles.
Flight time was still almost six minutes, which gave Yanakov some time to adjust, but it wasn't long enough to significantly reposition his units. And as the missiles came streaking in, for the first time, Eighth Fleet units found themselves on the receiving end of an Apollo attack.
It was not, Honor thought, watching the first few damage codes appear on her display, like the first drifting flakes of a Sphinx mountain blizzard, going to be a pleasant experience.
"Admiral, it's time," Captain DeLaney said quietly over the com, and Lester Tourville nodded.
"Yes, I suppose it is," he agreed. "Send the Fleet to battle stations, Molly. I'll be up directly."
"Yes, Sir."
Tourville terminated the connection and stood. He patted his skinsuit's cargo pocket automatically, checking to be certain his trademark cigars were where they were supposed to be. They'd become so much a part of his image that he probably could have demoralized his entire flag bridge crew by the simple expedient of giving up smoking.
The thought made him chuckle, and he was glad he was alone as he detected the edge of nervousness in the sound.
Let's just get that out of our system right here, Lester. No butterflies in front of the troops. They deserve a hell of a lot better than that out of you.
He glanced at himself in a bulkhead mirror. It was probably just as well none of his personnel knew he'd been sitting here, already skinsuited, for the last fifteen minutes. Not that it had been because of any opening-night jitters. Or, at least, not very much so. It was more calculating than that. By suiting up early, he could take the time to do it right and arrive on flag bridge calm and collected, looking as if he'd just stepped out of a training holo. Just another of those little tricks to inspire his subordinates to pretend, even to themselves, that he was an unflappable, calm, confident leader. So sure of himself he would turn up perfectly turned out, without a single hair out of place.
He ran one hand over the hair in question, and chuckled again, much more naturally... just as the music began to play.
One of Thomas Theisman's reforms had been to allow the captains of capital units the right to substitute more personalized selections for the stridency of the standard fleet alarms. Captain Houellebecq had a fondness for really old opera, much of it actually dating from pre-space Old Earth. Tourville had cherished private doubts when she decided to use some of it aboard Guerriere, but he had to admit she'd come up with a suitable selection for this particular signal. In fact, he'd thought it was an appropriate one even before she told him what it was called.
"Now here this! Now here this! All hands, man Battle Stations! Repeat, all hands man Battle Stations!" Captain Celestine Houellebecq's calm, crisp voice said through the ancient, surging strains of Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries.
"Ma'am, the Alpha Arrays are reporting-sweet Jesus!"
Lieutenant Commander Angelina Turner turned quickly, eyes flashing angrily.
"Just what the hell kind of report do you call that, Hellerstein?" she demanded harshly, even angrier because Chief Petty Officer Bryant Hellerstein was one of her best, steadiest people.
"Commander-Ma'am-this can't be right!" Hellerstein blurted, and Turner strode quickly towards his station. She'd opened her mouth in another, still sharper reprimand, but Hellerstein's shocked expression when he turned to look at her stopped it unspoken. She'd never seen the tough, competent noncom look... terrified before.
"What can't be right, Bryant?" she asked, much more gently than she'd intended to speak.
"Ma'am," Hellerstein said hoarsely, "according to the Alpha Arrays, three hundred-plus unidentified ships just made their alpha translations right on the limit."
Chapter Sixty-Four
"All right, Robert. Let's get those drones deployed."
"Aye, Sir!" Commander Zucker began punching in commands at his console, and Rear Admiral Oliver Diamato turned to his chief of staff.
"It's not going to take them long to figure out we're out here, Serena," he said, one hand gesturing at the master plot which showed the Manticoran Wormhole Junction. Just getting this close to the Junction made Diamato's skin crawl, because if there was one point-besides their home system's inhabited worlds-guaranteed to make the Manties respond like a wounded swamp tiger, it was the Junction.
"As a matter of fact, Sir," Commander Taverner replied with a mirthless smile, "I sort of suspect they already know, don't you?"